[Tommah]

Years ago, I worked for a startup that was trying to build a recruitment platform. We fed résumés into a few different SaaS résumé parsers, but the results that we got were generally unsatisfactory. They worked perfectly on maybe 5-10% of the résumés. The rest of the time, we would see some bad results, ranging from minor errors to total nonsense. Maybe AI will make these systems work better and produce more consistent results, but... hey, why are you laughing?

Anyway, a lot of these parsers resembled prototypes that could be solid systems if additional work had been put in, but this additional work had never actually been put in. My favorite example: one parser reported that a lot of the résumés showed experience with storage area networks, even though most of our résumés were from nurses. Hmm. It turns out that a lot of the résumés were from San Francisco, and the parser saw "San" and said "Hey, San is short for Storage Area Network!" This is stupid on several levels, but this is what goes on with these tools.

More recently, I applied to a job opening that was on one of the ATSes that are popular today (I don't remember which one). When it analyzed the text in my résumé, it determined that I worked at a company named Software Engineer. Oddly enough, it couldn't figure out what role I held at that company. These are tools that people pay money for, and they can't figure out that Software Engineer is a job title and not a company. It boggles the mind.

So if you apply to hundreds of jobs and you keep getting rejected, keep in mind that a lot of those rejections are because of nonsense like this. You'll also understand better why so many people advise you to look for jobs through your network. Your former coworker Bill will be able to explain who you are and what you worked on, while that newfangled ATS that just got another $10M in funding may look at your résumé and just get confused.